It’s a phrase you hear often. A habit of speech. I’m obsessed. It can be a squeal or a quiet whisper—typed in all caps on internet forums or confessed late at night to someone you trust. Obsession seeps into everyday life, reorganising it without announcement. It accumulates, quietly, insistently, and demands our attention. What does it mean to live alongside an obsession? To resist it, or to give in? Confessions of the Obsessed is an anthology dedicated to these fixations and longings. Across essays, short stories, and personal reflections, writers explore the intensity and gorgeous devastation of obsession and desire.
What keeps you up at night, with bleary eyes, into the early hours? What are the words that arrive when your mind won’t pause and everyone else in your house is asleep? The writing in this anthology tackles fear, is thrilled by it, and finds in it a type of knowledge. You’ll encounter an adrenaline-inducing train journey, an oblivious father, the bleached bones of a rabbit, haunted warning cries carried in the wind, and a hidden band of creatures who inspire rumours in a nearby town.
A longing for someone special, for someone far away yet so near—on devices that divide and alienate us. A desire for companionship, finding calm in the presence of others—but surrounded by strangers, feeling discarded and left behind. A yearning for change, to travel, to find yourself, to love. Have you ever wanted to just fly away and find somewhere you truly belong? Do Pigeons Yearn? is a non fiction and fiction anthology about how we—amidst a world that seems intent on alienation—may still find connection and calm in the presence of others.
It’s no secret that women have been overlooked through history, but none are more overlooked than the unlikable woman. In this anthology, we explore morally disruptive women across society—from the horrible, historical woman to the modern-day terror; from fictional characters to real-life figures. We tell the stories of the women who were just (maybe) the absolute worst.
How can we pushback against our volatile and precarious world? Let’s turn towards recycling, revitalising, revisiting; accessing the past to build a messier future. The Pushback is a magazine highlighting the emerging rebellion against the hypercapitalist world and reliance on smart tech. The exciting cultural shift back to analogue media and hand crafted art is celebrated in full within our pages!
From the rabbit hole to the graveyard, from buried secrets to planted seeds, digging is both an act of discovery and of concealment. This anthology invites you to pick up the shovel and uproot what hides beneath the surface, waiting to be unearthed.
We are not the first generation to live on the brink but we may be the first to forget that we’re trembling. On The Brink walks the line between pragmatism and optimism, tension and bliss. These thirteen works of speculative fiction reveal a spectrum of fears and hopes for humanity in an unstable world with an uncertain future.
This nonfiction anthology brings together artworks, poems, memoir and other modes of writing that mediate on the phenomenon of the fleeting. Ephemera is a murmuration heard in passing, circling the ineffable, obscured and refusing verification.
Come Together is a non-fiction magazine that recognises community as an experience that continuously finds and (re)produces itself. From this common space, our 16 contributors brought ideas and images that overlapped, entangled, and mixed with one another, ultimately forming a new dynamic whole. These stories seek to share the myriad ways we go about living and interpreting our sense of belonging.
The 21 pieces found within this magazine discuss the pervasive feeling that wellness, wellbeing, and self care are societal expectations that are to be practiced on top of extended work and study hours, a social life, and every other aspect of life. Frazzle considers how to change this.
With a sense of loss weaved throughout, Lost & Found looks to comfort, inspire, and incite quiet reflection on what it is that family can mean to you. Across 17 pieces, Lost & Found collects poetry, essays, interviews, recipes and experimental prose that searches for family, lost and found.
In 2021 RMIT will launch the Speculate Prize in partnership with Giramondo Publishing. Speculate is a new national award for an unpublished speculative fiction manuscript, sponsored by Whispir and supported by the Speculate Literary Festival.
Can you even be a travel writer anymore? A successful one? A good one?!
Certainly, in this current climate of unpredictability—the ‘will they, won’t they’ of lockdowns and border closures—you’re more likely to garner followers, likes and clout for writing about sourdough rather than seeking, soaking or sunning
I’ve always been fascinated by the spell a good yarn can cast over you but it wasn’t until I studied screenwriting that I actually understood where that magic came from: structure.
Once, in the middle of the night, I watched a Youtuber try to live one week of their life according to Haruki Murakami’s writing schedule.
For such a young medium, podcasting has already developed such distinct cultural markers; the close-mic breathy voice to mimic intimacy, the affectedly natural banter to start the episode, the fourth-wall-breaking nods towards the production and editing that goes into it (‘we’ll fix it in post’).
On 15 May I met my classmates for the first time. It was a Saturday and, after months of online lectures, ‘break-out room’ activities, and virtual roundtable sessions with writing, editing and publishing professionals, we gathered together at the Bowen Street Press for an intensive masterclass…
I was lucky enough to get to work closely with Anna for the months leading up to the issue, after the magazine accepted a work of mine for their first 2021 issue.
When I signed up to be on the working group for Hardie Grant’s ‘Spark Prize’, I did so with the belief that I was going to be getting valuable experience in the publishing industry.
Since Melbourne’s recent emergence out of restrictions, I thought it was about time I knuckled down and found myself a "real" adult job. I desperately wanted to end my hospitality career, to stop picking up empty glasses and serving rowdy drunken people at AFL matches, and secure a role within the editorial industry.
In the 1996 movie Fargo the movie opens with the following text:
> ‘This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.’
The Spark Prize is a new biennial joint venture between Hardie Grant Books and RMIT Writing and Publishing, which aims to foster talent in the narrative non-fiction genre and provide the successful applicant with the essential tools they’ll need to drive their book proposal to publication.
In the past few years, I’ve embraced a reverence for the object as artefact. Fears that digitisation would render print books obsolete were unwarranted. Vinyl records, nearly extinct in the early two-thousands, are making a comeback. It’s in the weight of the thing, in seeing the physicality of pages, grooves and keys.
However long the night, the sun will always rise. Whether you wake with the bird’s song or the snoozing of alarms, the new day begins differently for everyone. Day break brings new perspectives and horizons, the chance to start afresh within familiar routines. This magazine explores light on the concept of mornings, in all of the facets, through memories, musings, sensory experiences, imaginative stories, routines and rituals.